Jack Nicholson leans back, into the frame, and commences to tell us why he never eats fish. He talks for a solid six minutes – all one shot, uncut, a tight close-up (the photography is by Lásló Kovács, a BBS regular). The background is black; we don’t know where he is or who he’s speaking to. Our first instinct tells us that he is with a shrink and the disturbing nature of his monologue does little to disillusion us.

The anecdote Jack recounts, about he and his older brother letting their grandfather choke to death on the bones of a breaded sole – and how this shared experience made them “accomplices forever,” foreshadowing the brothers’ reunion in Atlantic City, the main setting of the film – is only interrupted when a red light flashes on his face and we realize he’s in a recording studio: he is the host of a late night radio show called Et Cetera. His name is David Staebler.

This “confession” is really a fiction: his grandfather is still alive (he’s played by Charles LaVine, a self-proclaimed descendant of the Wilkes Booths) and they live together in a seedy, old Philadelphia townhouse with a perilously slanted staircase. “I never put a model train in your hamburger!” the old man says, referring to an accusation made on the air. “It was a cricket from a Cracker Jack box.” However made-up, the opening monologue is one of the rare moments of intimacy afforded to the audience by David Staebler, who is otherwise withdrawn and introverted, second fiddle to his energetic older brother, Jason (Bruce Dern), who’s something between a con-man and a pipe-dreamer.

Later in the film – in a hotel suite in Atlantic City – David retreats to the bathroom with his tape recorder. “I have been deprived my literary right and I crave an audience,” he says, seated on the toilet. “The form of the tragic autobiography is dead, or will be soon, along with most of its authors. Goodbye, written-word… So I have chosen this form – radio – to author my life. Not because my life is particularly worthy, but because it is, hopefully, comically unworthy.”

If David Staebler were of this generation – finding the airwaves dominated by the likes of Glenn Beck and Garrison Keillor; no space for a “Philosopher King” – he’d probably be a blogger. I don’t know how much gratification he’d get from the form – all it amounts to is “graffiti with punctuation,” as Elliott Gould’s character snipes in Contagion. But it is comforting to know that while the same complaints are voiced with growing alarmism today, there are more outlets than ever for the tragic autobiographer, if not necessarily an audience or a pay-off.

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Side note: the monologue was originally a story written by Bob Rafelson as an assignment at Dartmouth. The professor threw him out of the class and told him to go get help.

The King of Marvin Gardens was released on DVD last year as part of the Criterion Collection’s excellent box set,  America Lost and Found: the BBS Story.

I am aware that the clip above has been flagged by Sony and blocked in some counties. I will do my best to get it up and working in the next day or so.